How to Train Your Children

The current obsession in our house is the How to Train your Dragon books, which we listen to in the car on the way to and from school, in the playroom before and after school and at bedtime every night. Ferdy's excuse for not being able to read his own writing is that Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third (the hero) can't either. We are currently on book 8 (we have had a few long car journeys) but the first book begins with the young Vikings trying to train their untrainable dragons, and Hiccup works out that actually the best way to train his maverick dragon Toothless, is to be nice to him and treat him with respect, rather than 'yell', the one word instruction in the tome used by Vikings for many years.. I sometimes find myself needing some tips from Hiccup.

It's proving a bit tricky to get Ferdy to do things at home at the moment, and he once again seems to be very tired and getting upset about doing any work related stuff. So, after some yelling (only joking), we decided to play a Vikings game. He and Gil set up their Viking ship (The Hopeful Puffin) to set off on a voyage to America.

tl-br: setting up The Hopeful Puffin; Stoick the Vast;
sailing in the Green Sea; the ship sets sail

Ferdy's been learning about positions at school and we'd watched a few videos earlier, so the (Mummy) goddess Aphrodite (my name chosen by Ferdy but I'm not complaining about being associated with the beautiful Goddess of Love) shouted out positions from the sky 'turn a quarter left, a quarter right, half right, full turn etc' and displayed cards with things like 'straight on, up, down, beside etc directing them towards the treasure/glasses case with Smarties in.

Just because there is a How to Train Your Dragon obsession in our house, it doesn't mean Star Wars has been forgotten about so Ferdy then read us a book and did some writing (albeit a bit reluctantly) about Luke's Jedi training. And I learnt that when you want to write a capital A, you have to turn your page upside down and write a V first...

Then it was off to the library to read books to a carrot.

Our afternoon's activity was to see Horrible Histories Dreadful Deaf at Derby Theatre. It was all about deaf people in history, of which not much has been recorded. We'd discussed a little in the morning about what being deaf was and also watched a video about a deaf boy communicating in sign language with his classmates, who had learnt some. Both boys were quite intrigued although Gil did shout 'is him deaf?' quite a lot whilst we queued up to go in to the theatre.

We learnt some good facts like that the Romans didn't let deaf people marry or have children; that Alexander Graham Bell (who invented the telephone) got the use of sign language banned and claimed that all deaf people should be taught to speak (despite having a deaf wife and mother); that Prince Phillip's mother was deaf, and that it's funny to shout Deaf and Dead at the end of a story...

It was a good lesson in historical oppression, something I don't think kids are ever too young to learn about. And also in treating people kindly and with respect. In book 7 of How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup (the hero) gets a slave mark, and later as an old man and great King and leader, he suggests that all kings should perhaps get a slave mark so that they understand what it is like to be oppressed. He's a wise man, that Hiccup is, who needs to read their own writing anyway...?

Rain, raining. Rain, raining. Rain, raining.

We decided to embrace the rain today.

Since we saw Michael Rosen at Hay, Ferdy's been looking up a lot of his poems and one of his favourites, which we found this week, is The Rains. Ferdy loves his voice where he says about the rain stopping, 'there were birds! It was light, warm in the sleeping bag, cold on our faces'. And whenever I've heard the rain this weekend (which has been often), I drum 'Rain, raining. Rain raining' in my head.

We'd been to Ferdy's Fathers' Day service at school this Friday and Ferdy is always a little edgy (and grumpy) after an hour of sitting down, so, armed with raincoats, wellies and lunch, we went straight out to search for rain (our obvious theme for the day), muddy puddles, things that like rain (ducks, geese, slugs) at the Wolseley Wildlife Centre.

tl-bl clockwise: the biggest muddy puddle; looking at bank voles; building a den;
in the meadow; in the tunnels; drawing the weather (sun, rain and rainbow)

Finding rain wasn't hard, and, thanks to one of the regular birdwatchers at the centre, we found a few extra things like baby bank voles (look closely in above top middle pictures), some muddy tunnels, a large den, a robin and a flash of kingfisher. Ferdy was most excited about the bank voles to whom he fed some of his duck food.

Back at home we measured how much rain we'd caught in cups placed outside. Annoyingly the rain stopped in the afternoon so we only got about 25ml.

We read some fact books about the water cycle (unpopular because they weren't stories) and then some other books with stories about rain in them (popular because they were stories). Favourites were The Rhythm of the Rain, a beautiful retelling of the water cycle, and Sam Usher's Rain.

It wasn't easy to get Ferdy to do any writing today, he seems to have decided that he can't write again (writing currently is a very loud affair with lots of ohohohohohs and OOOOOPSes whenever he forgets to space his words, writes a letter the wrong way around or forgets a capital), so instead of a poem (which we'd agreed on the day before), we compromised on him writing 10 words describing rain and the sound of rain. My favourite is pffffffff. Michael Rosen didn't start writing poems 'til he was 11 anyway, so there's loads of time...

A Home Education

We have been flexischooling for almost a year now and it has been pretty easy to incorporate Gil's needs into our Fridays.

Not this Friday however. Gil was ill (on his birthday poor darling!) and basically needed to be carried or on my lap all day. This meant we couldn't go anywhere, and everything we did had to be done sitting down plus I couldn't even put the telly on for Gil as there's no way Ferdy wouldn't watch it.

We are quite well set up for learning stuff (without Ferdy realising it) at home though, so, all plans scuppered and a trying day with an ill child ahead of me, with a small amount of trepidation I decided to entrust the day to Ferdy.

Set-up for home learning: the book and nature corner; the chapter
book shelf; the adventure corner; the Star Wars corner (I defy anyone
who says Star Wars isn't educational...)

Ferdy doesn't like to sit down very much, unless he is reading, looking at or listening to a story. Miraculously, he can then sit for hours.

So he decided to read some Star Wars books (and did some comprehension questions for his writing):

We have these brilliant
Star Wars workbooks

Then he proposed that I read: The Tale of the Castle Mice; How Many Legs; Mudpuddle Farm; The Big Book of Birds (and at his request we looked up some of the birds of youtube, including a Kakapo performing a mating ritual on a cameraman, and a puffin chick hatching).

His next plan was that we listen to the Moomins on his audiobooks. And then for his numberwork he suggested watching Numberjacks... (although he agreed on some Star Wars subtraction as well).

Getting a slight sense of how our day was panning out, I posed the idea of playing What's the Time Mr Wolf. Ferdy's been learning about telling the time at school so he rather enjoyed this. Especially when he won.

At lunchtime he made his own sandwiches.

And I have to confess that, after we had designed and set up a space scene in his bedroom and he had made a sun for it, Ferdy seemed to have not only lost any attention span (and me too from holding a sleeping/crying/coughing/crotchety 4 year old all day) but started wheezing, so we settled down to read more books and finally to watch Star Wars VIII.

I love the sun

Ferdy was ill and in bed all day on Saturday but having all recovered by Sunday (I'd been ill all week - for six and four year olds, illnesses last 24 hours, for 43 year olds, illnesses last 168 hours), we managed to carry out my original Friday plan which had been to go to the Lego exhibition in Derby.

A Lego sun

Imagining the World: A Hay Festival Special

Considering the fact that we have been to a literary festival for the last seven days, I find it very hard to put into words the gloriously sublime and truly illuminating experience we have had.

Who can really describe what it is like to witness Julia Donaldson, dressed up as Madame Dragon from Zog, singing Happy Birthday to the Gruffalo (it's his 20th birthday this year), to be in utter hysterics at Michael Rosen's funny stories about how he went to school in the Stone Age, or to create leafy pictures in a foraged art session?

Foraged art

How can we convey Ferdy's glee at meeting Andy Stanton; nearly falling off his chair laughing at how Andy described his experience of getting kicked out of Oxford University, and his joy at realising that the young Andy coveted many of the books that Ferdy currently loves (The Beano, The Dandy, Just William, Roald Dahl)?

Waiting to see Andy Stanton

Is it really possible to communicate the delighted expression on Ferdy's face when his hand shot up and stayed up for Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet (of Supertato fame) who asked: 'put your hand up if you have picked your nose today?', 'put your hand up if you ate it?' and 'put your hand up if you don't like putting your hand up'...?

Waiting for Sue Hendra

It would also be insufficient not to mention the awesomeness (Ferdy's word) of the black sicklebill's mating display, the dismay we felt at walruses in Greenland fighting for space on land (there is no longer enough ice for them to live on) and the overbearing sense of guilt we adults endured seeing far too much glacier crashing into the sea (twice as much as a decade ago), as shown by the directors of Our Planet.

And one of the absolute highlights was on the penultimate day, when we attended an evening performance of Spell Songs, a musical interpretation of a book we own called The Lost Words. This book centres around the concerning removal of various words like bluebell, otter and raven from the Oxford Junior English Dictionary, and subsequently from the language of the next generation. Each folk song, sung by a band of award winning folk artists focussed on one of the words in the book and our favourites were the one about the heron, and Ferdy's the barn owl.

All of these talks and shows were punctuated with frequent visits to the make and take tent, (Ferdy's heaven on earth), lots and lots of cake and chips (and beer for Mum and Dad), building dens with new friends, marshmallow toasting at the campsite (well actually it was morelike a glampsite, as electric blankets on real beds with a log burner can't really be called camping), reading books, jumping on trampolines with more new buddies, making dog buddies, playing frisbee, jumping in the hay barn, having arguments with new buddies, reading more books, herding geese and sheep, listening to How to Train your Dragon, reading even more books. And a tiny bit of boring sleeping.

tl clockwise to middle: in the make and take tent; playing with friends; eating doughnuts; on a literary giant;
boring sleeping in a bed with an electric blanket; on the trampoline; cafe games; in the make and take tent x2

We have come back with a ton of books, a load of inspiration, a bit smelly and with fat, cake-filled tummies. I asked Ferdy how he'd sum up his experience and he said: 'it was great, awesome and best buddyish'. Perhaps we had better work harder on introducing a few more adjectives to his vocabulary. Or perhaps, he too finds it difficult to embody our experience in words.

Ay ay may I play Jumping Clay today..

Ferdy is still doing a lot of mirror writing so our day started with him practising writing the letters a, b, d, g & s with our friend George who was staying.

He seems to find the s particularly impossible to get the right way around, even when he watches someone else write it. It's really hard to teach him because it feels like we're making him do something totally against his instincts.

After some number work at my computer, instigated by Ferdy, we went off to do some Jumping Clay.




This is a home ed group and they focus on a topic which lasts three weeks; we were in the last week so caught the tail end of it which had been all about food and where it comes from, how it's made etc.

We've done it before, primarily to help with his fine motor skills but, when he wasn't distracted by all the Jumping Clay characters around the room from his favourite books, Ferdy quite enjoyed talking about bacteria and then moulding a petri dish for it. 

Even better, however, was creating a character from one of his favourite stories (Sticky Beaked Sid from Open The Door in the Slinky Malinki series) and then listening to the story making Sticky Beaked Sid act it out - oh how Ferdy loves a story.

We're off to Hay on Wye for the book festival next Friday, so will be writing a special Hay Festival blog covering a whole week of storytelling. We're attending readings and performances by; Julia Donaldson, Michael Rosen, Sarah Cruddas (books about space), Andy Stanton (new Mr Gum books), Yuval Zommer (Big Book of Birds), plus we're doing some foraged art, going to a folk concert about nature and landscape and meeting Tove Jannsen (who wrote the Moomins)'s granddaughter. All surrounded by probably a lot of rain...

Us caught on the Hay festival camera last year

And what do you do with this leftover goo?...

Both boys have been wanting me to read The Lorax (quoted in the title) countless times this week, and with all the kids' protests about climate change happening on Fridays around the world, I have been feeling we should somehow have an eco Friday.

However, an eco Friday could really mean anything from looking at green energy, the food we eat, protecting our wildlife (or lack of it), to recycling, understanding climate change.. the list is endless. And whilst I quite like the idea of us joining the climate change protesters on a Friday, I think that Ferdy and Gil are too young to understand it all and I have to be careful not to project my own beliefs onto theirs, before they've even had a chance to form them. Better to just incorporate thinking about the environment into our Fridays for the moment.

So we read a few more books focussing on the plight of the environment: The Green Giant and Pesky Plastic, which is about different animals around the world thinking plastic is food. Ferdy's also learning about adjectives at school so we had to shout whenever we read one (who can ignore the The Lorax's rippulous pond and smogulous smoke).

Then, after a trip to the library, we went out to look for some trees at the Buddhist Centre.

On the 50m walk between our car and the entrance, we managed to pick up a bag's worth of people's leftover goo - crisp packets, plastic bags etc on the roadside.

Boy vs. Nature

There are some fine and majestic trees at the Buddhist Centre, and we had the place pretty much to ourselves. We tried to climb the trees, bashed them with a litter picker (not quite appropriate for an eco day), gathered leaves and daisies, made friends with a cat, hid behind the trees, got stung by stinging nettles, spotted butterflies and ladybirds, and ate beans on toast in the cafe.

Later on, at Ferdy's request we made some leaf paintings and had a gloomy conversation about a world without trees (we would all die wouldn't we Mummy). 

The Lorax was written in 1971 and we have been destroying our planet every since then. But essentially it ends in hope with the Once-ler (factory man) passing on the very last Truffula Seed to a young boy so he can plant a new Truffula Tree and, 'Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back'.

Perhaps it doesn't need to be complicated with kids, perhaps we can start with small things like picking up litter, appreciating wildlife and nature and thinking about recycling and reusing, borrowing or mending things before we buy new ones. We agreed that we'd all like the Lorax to come back.

It's what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

This blog could have been about how we went to see the Sandmartins nesting near Nottingham this Friday, and how we spotted herons, snails and slugs on a woodland walk. Or it could have been about the division by sharing that Ferdy requested we do before we go out, (although that may have been a bit boring).

But it's actually going to have to be about reading.

As mentioned a few times, Ferdy has not wanted to learn to read at all. He managed to spend his first year at school not reading any of the books that he brought home, and seems to have been extremely successful in getting us to read to him all the time, whilst totally ignoring all mention of looking at words or letters.

He has quite recently, encouraged by speech bubbles in The Beano, started to read properly. But since Easter (when no one was paying any attention to his reading) things have abruptly clicked and he is suddenly spelling out and reading everything he can see. 

In the last 24 hours tl clockwise to middle: reading instead of going to bed; reading instead of getting up;
reading to Gil instead of eating breakfast; reading in the car; reading instead of eating supper; reading in a cafe;
reading instead of lunch; reading when we got home; reading in the evening...

Ferdy didn't walk until he was nearly two; we were seeing a paediatrician as he showed no signs of walking at all. She suggested some exercises, which he wouldn't do. One day, when I was on the phone, he got up, walked past me in the kitchen, through the hallway and into the garden. I had never seen him walk before. He walked everywhere from that moment onwards. 

He is my son, so of course I think he's pretty amazing, but I am in awe of his ability to do things when he is ready, and only then, despite all the pressure surrounding him. Who knows what our children could become if we gave them the resources, but left them to do things at their own pace?

(title quote copyright Oscar Wilde)